Good morning all. I am Christopher Dawkins, Head of IT at Felsted, and am prompted to write by Martin Devon's post, which I am editing to mine. At the moment we use FreeBSD <SMALL> not SuSE, sorry, but best wishes </SMALL> on a p166 server, though assisted by transferring parts of the service to a P2-300 and two Athlon-500's, one of which runs <VERY SMALL> Red Hat with VMware on top. I am completely neutral on all platform/software matters, of course, and always use the best systems for the job while evaluating all others all the time, but having lost the NT CDs I bought last year have not yet got round to this one, and though I did buy two W98 machines on December 16th last year I reformatted the drives for FreeBSD on the 19th. We do have a number of Windows machines round the school, purchased against my strong recommendation ("forgive them, Lord, they know not what they do"), but they shall reap what they sow. Our servers currently support about 40 Archimedes machines, 51 Acorn NCs, 20 BBC machines, four Macs, 45 discless X terminals, a few client FreeBSD machines and about sixty PCs (most of these being privately owned pupil machines for whom we provide an RJ-45 socket). Some RiscStations are on order. A Squirrel server provides the main school databases. Server software is Apache, Squid, pine and similar things. You can connect in during the day on http://www.felsted.essex.sch.uk/, but there is as yet no description of the system there. Currently there is no fibre on our forty-acre 25-building network. Most of the long-distance connections rely successfully on pushing 10Mbit Base-T signals down Econet cables laid a decode or two ago.

My expectation of Linux is that we shall be able to run a fast dedicated server of the highest reliability - quite a consideration in a 24/7/365 organisation.

Just what we do, although Unix servers *do* crash. We put in a new one a few weeks ago and it rebooted regularly till we looked at the DIMMs and removed one that looked suspiciously as if it was 66MHz where it ought to have been PC100. The only Archimedes server left is the Squirrel one. Absolutely everything else is Unix based. All stations, even BBCs, have Web and email access from 8am to 9m. This year's success story has been the rolling out of discless X terminals based on old 486 boxes. These machines cost us about 250 pounds each, made up as (including VAT & delivery): 10 pounds - old 486/50 30 pounds - mouse, keyboard, network card, EPROM 110 pounds - monitor 60 pounds - hub port and network infrastructure 40 pounds - contribution to cost of Athlon server They run StarOffice 5.1, Netscape and pine on a KDE desktop, and with another forty or sixty this year we should be able to saturate the school. Note that the cost of the machine (10 pounds) is trivial compared with the total actual cost (250) of installing one of these systems. Annual running costs are difficult to estimate, but one machine did require five minutes of technician time this morning because the user did not know where the power switch was (the same happened with a BBC user yesterday). Technical support remains necessary even with these machines! There is also the time I spend dealing with lost passwords, chain letters etc. And many hours of server configuration. The VMware server allows any of our clients (except BBCs and earlier Arcs) to run a W95 virtual machine. The X clients do it almost natively: the others need to run VNC within which they run a KDE desktop within which they run a W95 screen (so an Acorn NC or RPC can have Fresco and Netscape and IE concurrently on screen, the code for the three browsers running on three different processors!). The W95 is running under VMware on a central Linux machine, where we have fifteen copies of a 220MB Windows drive (and we have a cardboard box containing fifteen unused fresh Windows licences too, painful that was, but it was much cheaper than Citrix and it keeps me out of jail). This is adequate for simple text applications but the performance is much below Citrix - even though the server is an Athlon-500 the effective client speed is like a 486-33. We think we are the most heavily Unix-based school in the country: anyway, we throw down the challenge and await replies! -- Christopher Dawkins, Felsted School, Dunmow, Essex CM6 3JG 01371-820527 or 07798 636725 cchd@felsted.essex.sch.uk